Like the poor lack empathy and then as you go up the bell curve empathy rises, maxing out at middle class, and then again falling as you start hitting being rich?
This sounds like a handful of people I know that believe food stamp programs are flawed and destructive to society. They same a handful of routine abusers and applied that as the norm. 9 people used the stamps appropriately and faded into a nonexistent memory, but the one person that returned food for fash and bought cigarettes and lottery tickets each time was the face they remembered
Then you should hopefully already understand the multiple reasons anecdotal evidence is a poor way of trying to understand large groups of people, which is why we use statistical studies.
The people specifically in your community, engaging with welfare resources, are in no way an accurately representative sample of a larger social class in all areas. Your specific region likely has unique cultural factors at play. The subset of people engaging with welfare have unique economic factors.